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Latest Japanese Fashion Trend: Girls Wearing Panties On Their Faces

The latest fashion trend sweeping the nation of Japan sees schoolgirls wearing panties on their heads.

MSN reports that young Japanese women have taken to putting panties on their heads, obscuring their faces. While this is fetish-food at its finest, it strikes the rest of us as rather odd. Then again, this is the same nation that gave us “bagel heads,” so in a strange way, becoming a panty-head sort of makes sense, I guess.

Photos are popping up of Japanese schoolgirls donning panty masks while doing mundane activities like laundry and performing karaoke. But what started this trend?

The popular theory shared by Kotaku and BuzzFeed is that an odd and eccentric Japanese superhero “Hentai Kamen” has inspired the trend. Billed as “the abnormal superhero” under salutations such as “panty bless you,” Hentai Kamen is a strange “homo-erotic parody of a Power Ranger” who wears panties on his head to conceal his identity and … nothing else. He’s got a film coming soon, but no one is really sure which came first: Hentai Kamen, or “kaopan” (face panties).

Images of girls wearing panties on their faces first popped up on the popular otaku website Akiba Blog, and let’s just say the response has been mixed so far.

“There’s a masked panty genre?” asked one confused reader. “I thought those where bandages” opined another. But “I really worry about this country” and, “The f***?” seem to be the the most relateable responses.

What do you think of the face panties trend? Oh, and here’s a trailer for Hentai Kamen, which is in Japanese and is NSFW: